Turkey’s neo-Ottomanisation

The breakdown of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 was caused on the one hand by the Arab nationalism that had swept all around the Arab world that despised the centuries-long rule of the white Turks over them, and on the other hand by an increasingly secular and pro-West Young Turks Movement that wanted a Turkey free of both an orthodox Islam and the yoke of the Arabs.

This changed only with Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) that came to power in 2003. Erdogan not only tried to recolour the Turkish nation with religion but also aimed for a greater political engagement within states that were formerly under the Ottoman Empire — a political ideology often termed as neo-Ottomanism.

Turkey’s personage in the Islamic world was augmented by Turkey’s reprimand of the 2010 Gaza Flotilla Incident, for which Netanyahu had to apologise to Turkey on behalf of his nation. Before that, in 2009, Erdogan had left the stage after bashing Shimon Peres on his lies on Gaza, in the Davos World Economic Forum. Indeed, defying the prevailing world order in championing the Palestine Cause is enough to make any leader a hero in the eyes of the Muslim world.

Yet from there, Turkey has come to be a regional and global player, with a hike to a $71 billion trade in the Asia Pacific region in 2017, from a meagre $17 billion in 2004, and a $9.2 billion trade with Latin America in 2017 from a mere $3.4 billion in 2006. Connecting with Central Asia with the vital Nabucco gas pipeline to Europe and doing business projects worth $55 billion with African countries made Turkey increasingly global in a globalising world.

But this engagement is not just geo-economic, it is also geo-political. In approaching Maduro of Venezuela, Erdogan has not only invested in one of the largest oil and gold reserves of the world, but has also made defense ties with a South American country defying the Monroe Doctrine.

In the Horn of Africa, Turkey has based the Somali Turkish Task Force Command in Mogadishu, Somalia, a country torn of militia culture and decades of Western intervention in its affairs. Remember the February 2017 elections of Somalia, wherein there was no “public voting” and the election was held in an airport hangar of Aden Adde Airport, Mogadishu? The winning candidate, Mohamed Farmaajo, who had been based in the United States since 1988, was flown into Mogadishu from New York on the morning of the election into the heavily-guarded airplane hangar. In such a crammed-up scenario, it was certainly daring of Erdogan to bring in humanitarian aid and military alliance. The Task Force expects to train 10,000 Somalian soldiers. Turkey also has bases in Qatar, Northern Cyprus and Sudan, in addition to troops in neighbouring Iraq and Syria.

Interestingly, the Syrian war has brought to the fore the factional rift between states which have been pro-Muslim Brotherhood (MB) like Turkey and Qatar, and the anti-ones like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE. At the beginning of the war, the Saudis tried to support Assad so that he could be kept away from Iran’s patronage and the region kept stable. But as the violence increased and after the US proclaimed Assad’s presidency as illegitimate, the Saudis fell into the trap of funding and organising anti-Assad rebel groups, making sure that the groups they supported were not linked to MB. Whereas Turkey and Qatar supported the MB-linked groups.

When the diplomatic crisis ensued between the Saudis and Qataris in 2017, Turkey not only supported Qatar with trade supplies but also set a military base outside Doha. And after Libya and Turkey signed the MoU, officially designating each other as maritime neighbours in November last year, Khalid ibn Walid Barracks was inaugurated in Doha as the joint headquarters of the two countries in December.

Going all the way across the Mediterranean to Libya with one foot in Cyprus was a daring feat for Turkey. Already Turkey was confronting the Russia-Syria-Iran-Iraq (RSII+1) coalition in Syria by having a Turkish-only buffer zone enforced along its border. And now when the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all came behind Khalifa Haftar in Libya, forsaking UN-backed Tripoli, we suddenly saw Russian mercenaries fighting alongside Haftar and Turkey coming to the aid of Tripoli. Suddenly Tripoli, which seemed all alone and poised to fall, became strong with Turkey’s support and the US rolled back behind Turkey, warning it would back Tripoli against “Russia’s attempts to exploit the conflict”.

The US had done something similar in Syria too when in October, after a phone call with Erdogan, Trump abruptly ordered the withdrawal of US Special Forces from Syria’s special zone, evidently leaving the job to Turkey.

The neo-Ottoman regime has also disturbed the plans for an East Mediterranean gas pipeline that Cyprus, Greece, Israel and Egypt want to develop to export the estimated $700 billion worth of natural gas of the Eastern Mediterranean basin to Europe. The maritime zone identified in the Turkey-Libya deal comes in the way of the proposed pipeline. And moreover, Turkey has intensified its own drilling in this area causing fears that it may be able to syphon the gas towards its drilling sites.

And what can Europe do to stop Turkey from its new assertiveness when it is constantly threatened by the inflow of refugees that can be unleashed by Turkey any time. This month when Syrian government air raids killed dozens of Turkish soldiers, Turkey opened its border for refugees to enter Greece. Before the 2016 Turkey-EU deal, over one million refugees had entered the EU and displeasing Turkey is the last thing the EU would be willing to do at this time. We need to examine if Turkey’s foreign policy is an overambitious one that is lining up too many enemies against it or is it a truly geopolitical venture that asks for a global expansion in an era of globalisation, if one needs to expand at all.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2020.

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